Текст книги "The Cassandra Complex"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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“So what are you waiting for?” she asked the big man. “Get me those bloody clothes. And something else to drink.”

Leland grinned as he took back the empty cup. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll cover your back if you cover mine. All we have to do is make sure that the good end happily and the bad unhappily. As long as the story works out, it won’t matter a damn whether there really is an immortality serum or not.”

Lisa waited until he had fetched the clothes, a bunch of bananas, and another cup of tea before telling him that the legendary Adam Zimmerman hadn’t approved of the word “immortality” because it implied an inability to die. “In the business,” she said as she regarded the bananas with a suspicious eye, “we prefer the term emortality, with an ‘e.’”

“They’re ordinary supermarket fruit,” Leland assured her. “Standard dietary supplements. No therapeutics, let alone psychotropics. I’m paid to hunt down bootleggers—I don’t rip off their stock.”

The shirt and slacks he gave her were loose, but not absurdly ill-fitting. When she’d achieved a better state of modesty and a fuller stomach, he handed back her belt, pouches and all. It was an obvious gesture of good faith. She could have summoned help within two seconds, using two fingers; he wouldn’t have been able to stop her. If they were way out in the wilds of Somerset or Gloucestershire, it might take so long for help to come that he and his friend Jeff could be five miles away by the time it arrived, but he’d have to be very clever indeed to avoid the consequent chase, and he probably wouldn’t get anything out of his captives in the meantime. Lisa didn’t bother to take the phone out of its holster.

“Had you checked out the Institute of Algeny?” she asked.

“Not yet.” The abruptness of the answer suggested there might have been no need—perhaps because the information that had been handed down to him had originated there. Perhaps, Lisa thought, Goldfarb’s disdain for the Algenists hadn’t been a mere matter of the pot assuming that the kettle was black.

“If Morgan did have something valuable,” Lisa observed, “the fact that he was talking to supposedly nonprofit organizations implies that he wouldn’t have wanted it to fall into the hands of your employers.”

“Or Mr. Smith’s,” Leland pointed out.

“Morgan wasn’t the government’s biggest fan,” Lisa agreed, “but he did know that there’s a war on. If he’d thought the MOD could use whatever he had, he’d have given it to them. I still think this is all a wild goose chase.”

“You’re probably right,” the big man conceded. “But if there are any wild geese to be caught, I want to be the one who bags them, and if there aren’t, I need to be able to convince my employers of that fact. If I can’t, I could be out of a job. Then, if you decided to turn vindictive later, I could be in a very deep hole indeed.”

“Strangely enough,” Lisa said grimly, “I think I know exactly how you feel. If this doesn’t go well, we could both end up regretting that we ever met.”

TWELVE

They looked in on both prisoners before attempting to bring either of them around. The first was in the bedroom next to the one where Lisa had been lodged. She had reddish-brown hair, severely cut into a styleless bob, and sharply delineated features flecked with freckles and moles. She was older than Lisa had expected, though not as old as Lisa herself. Lisa paused long enough to examine the tenor of the muscles in the arm that rested on top of the blanket covering her naked body.

“Metabolic retuning and artificial steroids,” Leland opined, but Lisa shook her head.

“Hard work, mostly,” she said. “Carefully calculated diet, obsessive exercising, strict denial of all cosmetic and quasimedical aids. She’s a Real Woman.”

“I don’t go for the muscular type myself,” Leland observed.

“Real Woman with a capital R and a capital W,” Lisa said.

“I thought they’d gone the same way as all once-fashionable causes. Died with the so-called third phase of feminism, didn’t they? Before my time, of course.”

And beyond your interest, evidently, Lisa added silently. She said, “The movement broke up, but its core members stayed loyal to its ideals, some of them even more so than they had been before. They still have a voice within the radfem ranks, and they still command a lot of respect in an elderly statesman kind of way.”

“We already knew they were radfems,” Leland observed in a neutral tone—but he was looking at her thoughtfully, as if there was something she wasn’t telling him.

“Did we?” Lisa countered.

“You saw the tapes of the university bombers,” he came back.

“You shouldn’t have,” Lisa reminded him. “They were supposed to be a secret between the police and the Ministry of Defence.”

“And the campus security patrol,” Leland pointed out. “How many holes does a sieve need? You don’t know her, I suppose?”

“I don’t think so,” Lisa told him.

“You don’t thinkso? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s supposed to mean that there’s something vaguely familiar about her. It might just be the type, of course—I’ve met more than a few Real Women in my time, and I wouldn’t necessarily recognize this specimen if we’d met ten or twenty years ago. Maybe I’ve seen her working out at one of the gyms I’ve used. Either way, I can’t put a name to her.”

“But if she were local, you’d have mutual acquaintances? All part of the same old-girls’ network?” He said it as if he thought he’d put his finger on a useful connection, but he didn’t follow it up. It would be easy enough to check out local women who’d once been self-declared members of the movement. Arachne West’s name would come out on top of the heap—but that didn’t mean that Arachne was involved, or that it would be easy to locate her if she were.

Lisa was still smarting from the insult of the “old-girls’ network” remark when she walked into the downstairs room where the second captive was secured, although she knew she was displacing emotional energy from a slowly growing anxiety that her personal involvement with this mess might not have begun, and might not end, with Morgan Miller. Fortunately, there was no danger of any further embarrassment. She recognized the second prisoner immediately, and knew that she was the real prize—the linchpin of the whole conspiracy.

Stella Filisetti was less than half Lisa’s age, and at least twenty years younger than her companion. Her pale hair was of medium length and silky, and her body was possessed of the peculiar combination of softness and solidity that was still the sole prerogative of authentically young women. She had not yet reached the point of decision regarding the use of such artificial aids as metabolic retuning, calorie-depleted food, indwelling scavengers, and epidermal rejuvenation.

Stella had been carrying the real gun, Lisa realized; it was Stella who had come within inches of killing her. It probably was not Stella who had called her a stupid bitch and taunted her with Morgan’s indifference, but it must have been Stella who had supplied the script.

“It’s Morgan’s current research assistant,” she informed Leland.

“Ms. Filisetti,” he said, to show that he was up to speed.

“Suspect number one,” Lisa confirmed. “The only one close enough to have taken a good long look at his continuing experiments and his stored data. The only one close enough to have gotten a hold of the wrong end of an awkwardly placed stick. She had the means to get the bombers into Mouseworld and almost certainly knew the codes that let the kidnappers into Morgan’s house.” But not, she reminded herself, the codes that let the burglars into my flat.

“We don’t know for sure that she got a hold of the wrong end of the stick,” Leland reminded her dutifully. “We have to work on the hypothesis that it might have been the right end.”

“You might,” Lisa demurred. “I’m not under contract to deliver the elixir of life to myemployers. All I have to do is free Morgan Miller before he gets hurt. For that purpose, the hypothesis that this is all some stupid mistake will do very well indeed.”

Leland didn’t bother to point out that if Miller really had nothing to give away, accounting for his exploratory visits to Ahasuerus and the Algenists wouldn’t be easy. He was more concerned to usher Lisa out of the room before Stella Filisetti woke up and heard them talking. He wanted to conserve the element of surprise.

Morgan must have been playing a game, Lisa thought. He was laying down a false trail, dangling a lure– and it worked, far too well. Why on earth couldn’t he have let me in on it?

Leland stood aside to let her precede him into a surprisingly capacious, if rather bare, kitchen, where a short and wiry man with a dark complexion—presumably Jeff—was seated at a hectically stained pine dining table, circa 1995. Lisa guessed that the table must have lost its initial polish shortly after the turn of the century, and that Jeff had never had any to lose.

As Leland and Lisa sat down, the other man politely rose to his feet, waiting for instructions. Leland told his subordinate to wake the prisoner in the downstairs room, advising him to do it gently and to give her a mug of tea, with lots of sugar. Jeff nodded. He filled a mug from the teapot that sat in the middle of the table and spooned three sugars into it before nodding to Lisa and departing.

“Okay,” Leland said when Jeff had closed the door behind him. “You know her. That puts the ball in your court. How should we play it?”

It wasn’t an easy question to answer. Lisa was slightly surprised that it had been asked. She had assumed that the plan was fairly simple: they would say what they had to say in order to elicit a response—any kind of response to begin with—and if Stella wouldn’t let anything slip, they would become gradually more provocative. Then she realized that Leland was testing her in exactly that progressive fashion: all Mister Nice Guy to begin with, slowly tightening the procedure to shake something loose from hercabinet of curiosities.

“She’s a rank amateur,” Lisa observed, feeling no compunction about reiterating the obvious. “She’ll be scared, but she must have gone into this knowing she’d eventually be caught. Professionally speaking, this was a suicide mission. Crazy—but not justcrazy. The motive must have been powerful if it not only moved her to this kind of recklessness, but allowed her to draw so many others into the conspiracy, including at least one Real Woman.”

“Right,” said Leland. “The rest probably know by now that they can’t hold out long, even if they thought differently to begin with. They must want to get the information to friends elsewhere before the net closes on them, but they obviously don’t have it yet. Why else would they come after you a second time? Miller’s holding out, or feeding them lies, and they haven’t found what they want on his computers or your wafers. That’s good—panic is always healthy in an interrogation situation. If I were to offer Filisetti a big enough bribe and a way out of the back door, do you think she’d sell her friends down the river?”

“How big a bribe?”

“Think of a number. What she’ll eventually get, if anything, will depend on what she has to sell. As to what we can offer—the sky’s the limit.”

There was no point in insisting that what Stella Filisetti would eventually get was at least ten years if Lisa had any say in the matter. “She’s not stupid,” she said instead. “She’s not going to believe you if you offer her a million euros. In fact, our principal problem is going to be persuading her that anything we say can be trusted—and persuading ourselves that anything she says can be trusted. As you’ve already pointed out, people desperate to buy time will come out with any old bullshit.”

Leland sighed. “All the effort that went into the Human Genome Project,” he said, “and we still have no trustworthy truth serum. Call that progress?”

Jeff returned. “She’s very woozy,” he reported. “Might be better to catch her before she’s collected herself.”

“Oh, well,” said Leland. “I guess it’s play-it-by-ear time. Come on.”

Lisa took a quick peek through the kitchen curtains as she followed Leland back to Stella Filisetti’s bedside, but there wasn’t much to be seen through the reflection of the lighted room. The absence of any discernible lights outside suggested that they were quite a way from the cityplex, but she already knew that. There was a faint animal odor in the corridor, but the suggestion that they were in an old farm laborer’s cottage could have been misleading.

Woozy or not, Stella Filisetti recognized Lisa immediately, and her eyes grew wide. She looked around as if unable to reconcile Lisa’s presence with the surroundings. The fact that one of her wrists and one of her ankles were secured to the head and foot of the bed by smartfiber cords must have told her that she was not in police custody, even if the godawful carpet and matching curtains hadn’t.

“Hello, Stella,” Lisa said, unable to deny herself the satisfaction. “How does it feel to be such a lousy shot?”

The younger woman didn’t reply, although her eyes certainly reacted. Lisa moved a straight-backed wooden chair to the side of the bed and sat down, her face no more than a meter from Stella Filisetti’s. Leland remained standing, showing off his intimidating bulk.

“This is how it is, Stella,” Lisa said, improvising furiously. “For me, this is a personal matter, for reasons you’ll understand perfectly. For my friend here, it’s business. He wants to bribe you and I want to cause you pain, but we both want Morgan Miller and we’re prepared to settle for that. If anything happens to him that you could have prevented by talking to us sooner, you’re going to answer to me as well as to the courts—and I can guarantee that it won’t be a comfortable ride.” She really had intended to start out gently, but it wasn’t so easy to play nice while she was staring into the unrepentant face of the person who was responsible for this whole sorry mess, who had compounded that offense by trying to shoot her.

“You can’t do this,” the younger woman said, with little conviction.

“Yes, we can,” Lisa retorted, figuring that she might as well go with the flow now that she had turned on the tap. “You know full well that anything that could motivate you to pull off this crazy stunt has to be important enough to motivate us to do what it takes to prize it out of your hands. It’s driven you to the brink of committing murder, although I doubt that you had any inclination in that direction beforehand, so you can imagine well enough how far it might drive us. It’s time to give it up and save yourself—and we can arrange that too. Just tell us what we need to know while there’s still time and you can walk away.”

“I don’t know where Morgan is,” Stella replied swiftly. “They thought it best that I didn’t, just in case …”

Was it too glib? Lisa wondered. It would, after all, have been a sensible precaution to keep Morgan’s location secret even from their own field troops—but these conspirators had not so far shown much sign of being sensible people. Even by the standards of a crazy world, they seemed seriously deranged.

“I don’t believe you,” Lisa said when she’d paused long enough. “The stupid thing is, Stella, that your scruples have led you astray. It was all a scam—a trap. Morgan seems to have fallen into it too, but he always did like to be out there ahead of the field, didn’t he? Never a team player, alas, even while he was playing for the greatest team of all in the cause of progress. Heroic individualists can be so seductive, don’t you think? Well, of course you do. I know exactly how you feel, because I’ve been a victim too—for forty years. Imagine that! I know exactlyhow you feel, Stella, because I’ve been up and down the same escalator half a dozen times. I know exactlyhow seductive Morgan can be, and exactly how deceptive—but I love him anyway. I always have. I love him enough to do whatever’s necessary to save him from his own recklessness. So I’d be very grateful if you could just tell me where he’s being held. It’s over anyway. You must see that. You don’t have the data, and time’s already run out.”

All the time she had been speaking, Lisa had been moving her face closer to Stella Filisetti’s, flaring her nostrils slightly and widening her eyes so that the whites would be visible all around the irises. As mad acts went, it lacked all subtlety, but subtlety didn’t seem to be an issue anymore.

It didn’t work. It wasn’t, as far as Lisa could judge, that the younger woman didn’t seem convinced. It was more a matter of the conviction being woefully insufficient to break her resistance.

“Okay, Dr. Friemann,” said Leland, his voice lowered almost to basso profundo. “That’s enough of the threats. I warned you, didn’t I? Now get the hell out of here so I can have a sensible conversation with the young lady.”

Lisa winced inwardly, not so much at the “young lady” bit as at the realization that Leland had obviously learned his good cop/bad cop routine from classic movies that Stella Filisetti had probably seen and laughed at while she was in her teens. Lisa had no alternative, though, but to keep on going with the flow and hope that the oldest tricks were still the best. She stood up and stalked out of the room, closing the door behind her before pausing and gluing her ear to the ancient hardboard panel.

“She’s upset,” Leland explained to his prisoner, his deep voice clearly audible through the door. “She doesn’t understand modern commerce. The police tend to have a very jaundiced view of the way the economy works—but that’s necessary to the way they play their role. They’re obliged to regard most forms of private enterprise as evil, and they don’t have to recognize or face up to the fact that if they weren’t necessaryevils, they wouldn’t exist. Personally, I’m a pragmatist. No ax to grind. To me, it’s just a matter of fixing a price.”

“It’s not for sale,” Stella Filisetti told him. Her voice wasn’t powerful, but the words were quite distinct. “If you think it could be, you don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s lied to you.”

“She? You mean Dr. Friemann? Why would she do that?”

Lisa bit her lip, but reminded herself that Leland had to know that this was a ploy even older and more hackneyed than his own. Being helpless, the only chance Stella Filisetti had was to sow dissent in the opposition ranks.

“Because she wants it for herself. She’s taken the long way around, but she knows what it is and she wants it. We have proof of that.”

“What proof?” Leland wanted to know.

“Check your records, megacorp man. It’s in the freezer.”

What’s in the freezer?Lisa thought, knowing that Leland must be wondering exactly the same thing.

“If Dr. Friemann already knows,” Leland said, “the secret’s already out. What harm is there in letting me in on it too?”

“It’s been buried too long already,” the higher voice said, becoming slightly shrill as hysteria sharpened its edge. “She’s helped to keep it under wraps—but we’re not going to let it stay buried. It doesn’t matter what you do to me. I can’t tell you where Miller is. We had to make certain of that.”

“Everything’s for sale, Stella,” Leland told her—but Lisa could hear the puzzlement in his voice. “It’s just a matter of finding the right price. The only question you have to ask yourself is whether you’d prefer to deal with a good customer or a skinflint.”

“If that’s what you think,” Stella responded, “then she’s definitely lied to you. God only knows what game she’s playing—I certainly don’t—but she and Miller have kept this thing between themselves for forty years. In my book, that’s a crime against humanity. If you want answers, ask her.”

That, Lisa thought, hadto be acting. It had to be a bluff, no matter how convincing it sounded.

“I have asked her,” Leland said. “She’s convinced me that she doesn’t know why Miller was taken. If you want to convince me otherwise, you’ll have to give me more than mere abuse. It might be as well to remember that I’m the only thing standing between you and a long jail sentence. I’m the only one who can get you out of this.”

“I don’t have to convince you of anything,” the young woman told him. “In fact, I hope you’re right. I hope Miller didkeep it secret, even from her. If it istrue, however unlikely that may be, she’s going to be extremely pissed when it does come out. Anything she wants to do to me, she’ll want to do to Miller ten times over. If she thinks hell has no fury now, wait till she finds out what scorn really is!”The way the captive raised her voice implied that she knew perfectly well that Lisa was listening, and that she was talking to both of her interrogators, determined that if she couldn’t drive a wedge between them, she could at least sow a little unhealthy confusion.

“I’m sure that’s right,” Leland said, having carefully lowered the volume of his voice, perhaps to imply that he was prepared to deal confidentially. “My people are pretty sure that she doesn’t know—although I might be able to change their minds if you explain to me why you think otherwise. So why don’t you let me in on the secret, so that we can figure out exactly what it might be worth?”

“To you,” Stella Filisetti replied, not bothering to whisper, “it’s not worth a damn thing. And that bitch outside the door, whether she’s a rat or just a fool, probably isn’t going to profit from it now. To us, it’s worth everything.More than anything the law can throw at us once we’ve given it to the rightpeople. So you and Friemann can go fuck yourselves—or each other, if you have the stomach for it. You’re getting nothing out of me. Even if I knew where Miller is, I wouldn’t tell you. You can hurt me as badly as you like, but all you’ll get is wasted time.”

Leland was silent. His script had been blown apart. If Stella’s lying, Lisa thought, she’s much better at it than her amateur status suggests. If she’s playing a game, she has far more skill than the average panicky interrogatee. If there really is a riddle to be solved, it isn’t going to be easy to unravel, even though it doesn’t need a genius to figure out what it must be that she thinks Morgan has discovered.

After a further minute, Leland emerged from the room and closed the door behind him. “Better let her consider her situation for a while,” he murmured. “Could be that the other one will be a little saner. After all, she’s never screwed your crafty boyfriend.”

His tone was neutral, but Lisa could tell that Stella Filisetti had got through to him. Whatever trust Leland had had in her had evaporated. From now on, she was a suspect in his eyes too. She wondered whether it was time to call for help, but decided after a moment’s hesitation that duty could wait a little longer. After all, Leland could be right. The Real Woman presumably hadn’t ever screwed the aforementioned crafty boyfriend, and even Lisa had to admit that that might make her just a little bit saner than someone who had.

“But this time,” Leland added, “it’s my turn to go first.”

Second Interlude

DISTURBIRG SYMPTOMS

The dog riots of 2010 were the closest Lisa ever came to “frontline policing.” She was called to the university to serve as an adviser to the chief inspector, David Kenneally. What she had in mind as she traveled out in one of the vans was a cozy situation way behind enemy lines, from which she could offer expert judgment as to the wise deployment of the uniformed officers. Kenneally had other ideas; although he had taken a training course in Advanced Negotiating Skills, he did not feel that what he had been taught was particularly relevant to the situation.

Presumably, the chief inspector would have felt far more confident if a lone gunman had taken hostages, or if some overstressed undergraduate were sitting atop the biology building threatening to jump, but Lisa had little sympathy for his plight. If Advanced Negotiating Skills didn’t cover ugly mobs whose members had studied strategy and tactics by watching videotapes of cult activity in Jerusalem, Tokyo, and New York in 1999 and 2000, what on earth was the use of them in the twenty-first century?

“Why me?” Lisa asked when Kenneally told her he wanted her right beside him when he went to meet the notional leader of the demonstration.

“You know more about their concerns than anyone else on my staff does,” he informed her.

“Only because I was once what they’dcall a professional torturer,” Lisa pointed out. “I even used to practice my dark artistry on this very site. I never worked with dogs, but I think the temperature out there’s already a little too high to encourage nice distinctions. Right now, they’re not likely to concede that being a mere mass murderer of mice is the next best thing to saintly innocence.”

“We won’t have to discuss your credentials with the demonstrators,” Kenneally informed her dismissively. “You have seen this videotape they’re up in arms about, I take it?”

Lisa had to admit that she had. “The voice-over is a pack of lies,” she said. “Okay, so the dogs in the first sequence are more than a little disoriented, and maybe more than a little distressed, but there’s no way their symptoms were caused by prion proteins or by any prion-producing autoimmune reaction. The labs have mouse models of classic CJD and at least three of its variants, but nobody makes dog models of anyhuman disease. The second lot are notbeing injected with immunosuppressant viruses for the sake of germ-warfare research, and the puppies being gassed in the final sequence are being put down humanely in order that researchers can study the development of a disease that kills thousands of pets and working dogs every year, with a view to finding a cure. Nor are any of the dogs British-born—ever since the 2000 ban on the breeding of domestic dogs for research purposes, the university has imported the very few dogs it needs from France. The tape’s pure black propaganda from beginning to end.”

“That’s exactly what I need, you see,” the chief inspector told her. “The calm voice of sanity.”

“But they’re not going to listen to the calm voice of sanity,” Lisa told him. “That’s not the way this kind of game is played. Even if the students who routinely use the building are steering clear, there’s bound to be somebody out there who’ll recognize me and tip them off. To them, I’ll just be one more vivisectionist plugging the party line. Believe me, sir, they hate police scientists almost as intensely as they hate company-funded research workers.”

“You speak their language,” Kenneally insisted.

“Maybe—but with an inflection that immediately marks me as an enemy,” she protested. “You might as well ask Chan to talk to them.” Chan was also in the van, as was one of the campus security guards.

“Dr. Friemann’s right,” Chan put in. “If it is not safe for me to go out, it is not safe for her.”

“But Dr. Friemann is a police officer,” Kenneally pointed out. “For her, it’s a matter of duty.”

Chan called Edgar Burdillon on his mobile phone and told him what the chief inspector was planning to do, but Kenneally was no more impressed by Burdillon’s objections than he had been by Chan’s.

“If you go out to talk to them, they will turn it into an argument,” Chan said to Lisa. “It will add fuel to the flames. Far better to stonewall them. If the chief inspector’s men can hold their position, the gale might just blow itself out. If you provoke them, you will definitely end up having to deploy riot shields and mount baton charges.”

“It’s not my decision,” was all that Lisa could say in reply.

“With all due respect, Dr. Chan,” Kenneally said, “I think I know more about keeping order in this sort of situation than you do. I helped to police dozens of political demonstrations and labor disputes while I was in the Met between fifteen and ten years ago. I even faced down the Countryside Alliance a time or two.”

“The Countryside Alliance went to bat for the privilege of killing things,” Lisa pointed out tiredly. “They weren’t possessed by anything like the kind of righteous fervor that has these people in its grip.”

In the end, of course, the chief inspector prevailed. He was the one with the privilege of issuing orders. Kenneally and his reluctant scientific adviser sallied forth, valiantly hoping to slay the dragon of extremism with the lance of moderation.

The crowd outside the main entrance of the building was about two hundred strong, but at least three-quarters of them had only come along to watch. They weren’t being proselytized particularly fiercely and for the moment, they weren’t part of the mob per se. The Animal Liberation Front and its allied organizations had bused in some two dozen agitators to swell the ranks of the local hard-liners, most of whom were local only in the sense that they lived somewhere in the cityplex. Being the easternmost campus of the Combined Universities, this one had attracted far less public attention in the past than those closer to the old Bristol city center, but the videotape that some insider had cobbled together with the aid of a miniature camera had brought the facility into prominence in spite of the fact that what the tape actually showedwas negligible without the highly imaginative and completely mistaken voice-over. Having come into the eye of the public, however, the campus was not to be allowed to slip out again without a fight; that had become a point of principle ever since the ALF’s nuisance tactics had started winning battles.

Chief Inspector Kenneally was a hardened twentieth-century man; he hadn’t adapted to the reality of the new millennium. He still believed in arbitration and compromise, but his opponents here were only interested in forcing concessions—and if they had to batter a few policemen to do it, they were ready to face the consequences. The jails were so overcrowded that they would be out on amnesty in a matter of months.

The leaders of the demonstration went by the cod-revolutionary pseudonyms of Eagle, Jude, and Keeper Pan. Keeper Pan was the only female. All three had voices trained to carry, and none was given to speaking if he or she could shriek instead.